Marty Andrews

artful code

Friday, May 12, 2006

legendary service

I'm currently spending some time consulting at a big corporate in Melbourne, where we've been trialling the use of Confluence as a new wiki. Part of my work in that trial has been to install it onto WebSphere. I did that, and got it up and running, but then started having some issues a couple of days later following some minor environment tweaks. Searching the forums and online docs found no answers, so I decided to try some more direct contact.

At this stage, we are running on an evaluation license only. No money has been handed to Atlassian at all so far. I expected a response, but probably via email a couple of days later. I headed to the support site they have set up to see where I could post my problem. Right there in the middle of the screen is a big button saying "Live Help. Click Here". Ok - I'll give it a go.

Up pops a litlle web-based chat client. It tells me I'm 1of 1 people in the queue, and someone will be with me in 60 seconds. Sure enough, about a minute later, I see this:

atlassian_dave has joined the conversation.atlassian_dave: hi, how can i help you?

Over about the next 2 hours, atlassian_dave stayed with me on that live chat and patiently helped me work through a bunch of possible technical problems. We systematically eliminated potential issues until the end of the day. The problem still wasn't solved by the time we were done, but I was well down the track. I was impressed both with the initial reponsiveness and the overall length of support. Especially considering I wasn't yet representing a paying customer. The 'legendary service" tag is a pretty big claim to make, but in my short experiences so far, they've been impressive.